At the time of this writing, the ICDAR 2017 Program Committee is in the process of making paper decisions. Final paper decisions along with updated reviews are expected to be available to authors on July 1st. I wish to express my sincere thanks to all Program Committee members for their hard work. Their efforts greatly contribute to the high quality of our flagship conference!

For your convenience, here is a brief overview of upcoming events and activities related to ICDAR 2017. Lists of workshops and competitions at the conference may be found elsewhere in this newsletter. The schedule for ICDAR workshops and tutorials will be available soon on the conference website.

Competitions. Many of the 25 competitions at ICDAR 2017 are currently drawing to a close. Details may be found in the competition web pages (ICDAR Competitions).

Workshops. Nine interesting workshops on a variety of topics are being held at ICDAR 2017. A number of the workshops have upcoming submission deadlines (ICDAR Workshops).

Tutorials. Three tutorials on state-of-the-art work in reading text in natural scenes, graph-based pattern recognition/document analysis, and word spotting will be offered at ICDAR 2017 (ICDAR Tutorials).

Doctoral Consortium (Deadline: July 15th, 2017). Submissions for the ICDAR Doctoral Consortium are due soon. Please note that preference will be given to PhD students who have identified a research direction and published initial results, but whose specific thesis topic is still being explored.

Looking ahead, please consider submitting your work to the upcoming IJDAR special issue on Deep Learning in Document Recognition, and to DAS 2018 and ICFHR 2018 whose calls for papers are now available (the DAS CFP is also included in this newsletter).

Finally, a new dataset containing handwritten Vietnamese has been added to the TC-11 dataset collection. Have a look, and please consider submitting your own datasets for use by members of TC-11 and the research community at large. Instructions on how to submit your datasets is available here: http://www.iapr-tc11.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=Datasets.

We are looking forward to your submissions for these Workshops. We also solicit your gracious support in circulating this information among your students, colleagues and scientific/research community to give it higher visibility.

In 2011, the first Doctoral Consortium in the Document Analysis community was organized in conjunction with the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR). This has led to successful successor events at ICDAR 2013 and ICDAR 2015. The tradition of having a Doctoral Consortium as a satellite event to the ICDAR main conference will be continued at ICDAR 2017 in Kyoto, Japan.

The goal of the ICDAR 2017 Doctoral Consortium is to create an opportunity for Ph.D. students to test their research ideas, present their current progress and future plans, and receive constructive criticism and insights related to their future work and career perspectives. A mentor (a senior researcher who is active in the field) will be assigned to each student to provide individual feedback. In addition, students will have the opportunity to present an overview of their research plan during a special poster session.

Participation in the ICDAR 2017 Doctoral Consortium will be limited to 25 students. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit their application by July 15 (submission procedure to be announced). The Doctoral Consortium Chairs will then review all applications received. Preference will be given to students who are at a stage in their studies most likely to benefit (i.e., they have identified a research direction and published some initial results, but the thesis is not yet set in stone).

Participation to the Doctoral Consortium will be free for all accepted students, i.e., there will be no extra registration fees!

The ICDAR 2017 Doctoral Consortium will take place the day before the main conference, i.e., on Sunday, November 12.

HDI 2017 will focus on how humans interact with written information around them, and the interfaces between users and documents. The term document is meant in the wider possible sense, to refer to any physical object that carries written information.

The workshop aims to create a space for debate between the Document Image Analysis and Recognition and the Human-Computer Interaction communities, and it is motivated by a number of recent developments that point to a coming change of paradigm in the way we interact with written information around us.

Fresh paper submissions as well as re-submissions of improved versions of rejected ICDAR papers (submitted along with the original reviews) are welcome. Accepted papers will be published in the "ICDAR 2017 Workshops" IEEE CPS volume.

Topics of interest include, among others:

Augmented documents

Linking physical and digital content

Reading behaviour analysis

Human factors

User experience and usability

Wearable sensors in reading

Interaction for facilitating Document Image Analysis (teaching reading systems through the way humans interact with written information)

ICDAR Workshop on Machine Learning (repost)

Submission Deadline

Paper Submissions: July 5, 2017

Please consider participating in the Workshop on Machine Learning in Kyoto, Japan on November 11, 2017, which is co-located with the ICDAR 2017 conference. The workshop aims to facilitate interaction, collaboration and engagement between the document analysis community and other research communities including pattern recognition, machine learning, computer vision, and image analysis.

Manuscript length: IEEE format with 6 pages (maximum). WML-2017 follows a single-blind review process, and so authors are asked to include their names and affiliations in their paper submissions. Submissions will be made through EasyChair.

Overview. DAS 2018 is the 13th edition of the 100% participation single-track IAPR sponsored workshop focusing on system-level issues and approaches in document analysis and recognition. The workshop comprises invited speaker presentations, oral, poster, tutorial and demo sessions as well as working group discussions.

DAS 2018 will be organized at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), in the heart of Vienna’s city center, which places the attendees within walking distance to a large variety of world-famous historical and cultural attractions. The program will include long and short papers, posters and demonstrations of working or prototype systems. All submissions will undergo a rigorous review process with a minimum of 3 reviews considering the originality of work, the quality of research or analysis of experience, the relevance to document analysis systems, and quality of presentation.

Information regarding paper submissions is provided below. Note: Submission of a paper involves a commitment that, if accepted, one or more authors will attend the workshop.

Full Papers. Full papers should describe complete works of original research. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another form, up to 6 pages length.

Short Papers. Short papers provide an opportunity to report on research in progress and to present novel positions on document analysis systems. Authors may submit short papers (up to 2 pages in length). Short papers will also undergo review and will appear in an extra booklet, not in the official DAS 2018 proceedings.

Demonstrations. DAS 2018 seeks public demonstrations of novel systems, to be presented to the workshop as a whole during breaks between paper sessions. Prospective demonstrators should submit a two-page summary of the system to be demonstrated. Demonstration proposals will undergo review and summaries of accepted demonstrations will appear in the extra DAS 2018 booklet, as in the case of short papers.

IJDAR Discount for IAPR Members (repost)

IAPR is pleased to announce a partnership agreement with Springer, the publisher of IJDAR, the International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. This new agreement will allow IAPR members to receive a subscription to the electronic version of IJDAR at a discount of nearly 50%. For additional details, see the links below:

IJDAR Special Issue:Deep Learning for Document Analysis and Recognition (repost)

In recent years, applying Deep Learning techniques to Document Analysis and Recognition (DAR) tasks has produced significant performance gains. These have included impressive advances in handwriting recognition, word-spotting in document images, document segmentation, and text detection in natural scenes.

This special issue aims to report new advances in DAR using deep learning methods. Articles presenting reviews, perspectives, new methods and applications in DAR are cordially invited. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to uses of Deep Learning for:

Call for Contributions: To contribute news items, please send a short email to the editor, Richard Zanibbi (rxzvcs@rit.edu). Contributions might include conference and workshop announcements/updates/reports, career opportunities, book reviews, or anything else of interest to the TC-11 community.